A panel of professional landscape and garden designers blogging monthly on topics related to garden design

Posts Tagged ‘Lawn Alternatives’

This month on Garden Designers Roundtable, We’re talking ‘Lawn Alternatives’, and we’re very excited to have the Lawn Reform Coalition joining us for a blogging extravaganza! The Lawn Reform Coalition is Thirteen gardening and environmental advocates from across the U.S. promoting change in the American lawn, a loose coalition of writers and activists (including lawn-haters and lawn-improvers) pooling knowledge of up-to-date solutions to the many problems caused by a lawn culture that demands perfection, conformity, and the overuse of water, fertilizer and pesticides. To learn more about the Coalition, and to join in the revolution, visit www.LawnReform.org.

We’ll be joined this month by the following Lawn Reform Coalition members:

Billy Goodnick – Billy is a landscape architect based in Santa Barbara, CA, specializing in designing public and residential landscapes. His freelance writing and his Cool Green Gardens blog at Fine Gardening Magazine instruct and encourage readers to adopt a more sustainable approach in their landscapes. Billy also co-hosts an educational and humorous regional television show,Garden Wise Guys, that emphasizes water conservation and lawn alternatives.

Evelyn Hadden

Evelyn Hadden – Evelyn has been writing about nature-friendly, chemical-free, do-it-yourself, low-maintenance landscaping since 2001, when she founded the informational website LessLawn.com. She gardens in Minnesota and travels across the country speaking to other gardeners about ecological gardening, lawn alternatives, and ideas for shrinking your lawn. Her most recent book, Shrink Your Lawn: Design ideas for any landscape, won a silver medal in the Independent Publisher’s 2009 Living Now Book Awards for promoting a healthy and balanced lifestyle. Evelyn works with the Permaculture Research Institute Cold Climateto find and share ways to build a restorative human culture.

Ginny Stibolt – Ginny is the “Transplanted Gardener” from Maryland, where she received her MS degree in botany, to NE Florida. Her column for Jacksonville’s Florida Times Union is posted on her website and on Floridata.com, Many of her columns have been republished in Master Gardener newsletters and elsewhere, and she also writes for Vero Beach Magazine. She’s the author of Sustainable Gardening for Florida, published by the University Press of Florida.

Of note, two of our own members here at Garden Designers Roundtable are also Lawn Reform Coalition Members. Susan Morrison and Shirley Bovshow will also be posting today.

Garden Designers Roundtable is also very excited to announce in conjunction with this month’s topic, that one of our own, Pam Penick, has a new book coming out in February of 2013 entitled “The Alternative Lawn”, to be published by Ten Speed Press. Look for more information here and on Pam’s blog Digging as we get closer to the publishing date. Congratulations Pam!

Now without further ado, may we present to you our readers, ‘Lawn Alternatives’! Just click on the links below and Enjoy!

Humans, have an unnatural love affair with lawns. We spend countless hours and tons of chemicals trying to produce the perfect green carpet, because somewhere along the line it became popular wisdom that a perfect lawn was not only a thing of beauty, but a symbol of status and conformity.

Next week on August 23rd, right here, Garden Designers Roundtable is joining forces with The Lawn Reform Coalition to reveal that The Emperor has no Clothes! That’s right, you can have something other than a green carpet, and still be a valuable member of society. So, please join us for this very special event, as Susan Harris, Billy Goodnick, Saxon Holt, Ginny Stibolt, and Evelyn Hadden, along with fifteen of our own Roundtable members, as we consider ‘Lawn Alternatives’! Be sure to stop back next Tuesday, at 10 am!

In the meantime, if a neighbor turn up his nose up at your less than perfect lawn, or laughs aloud because you have flowers and vegetables instead of a manicured carpet, just tell him to take a good look at his monument to conformity, and repeat after the great Jackie Wilson – “Don’t let the Green Grass Fool Ya!”

Click play and enjoy, while you look at the images of “conformity” below!